Containerized software is huge in the sciences for reproducible research. Or at least it will/should be (speaking as someone adjacent to bioinformatics and genomics)

Incredible. I don’t know enough Prolog to be able to follow it very well, but this is truly what the internet was made for

There are plenty of Jewish people who consider “Jewish” as being both a religious and ethnic identifier. I used to think of Jewishness as purely a religious description until I actually met some Jews (I moved from a tiny village to a larger town that had a decently sized Jewish community, and one of my close friends was Jewish), who disagreed with my impression. For additional context, I live in the UK, so your blanket statement about Europe does not apply to the level that you state it.

“the last people that tried to make it an ethnic description were literal Nazis.”

Given that there are many Jews who recognise “Jewishness” as pertaining to both religion and to ethnicity, in the present day, it seems quite inappropriate to make this comparison. I realise that you’re seeking to denounce Israel’s ethnonationalism, but it’s possible to criticise Zionism without having to deny the existence of Jewish ethnic groups. Hell, one of the things I found especially powerful about my local pro-Palestine demonstrations was seeing how much I learned about Judaism by working alongside secular Jews and religious Jews brought together by anti-Zionism.

This, a thousand times. Also echoing what someone below said that a physiotherapist may be best, but in my country, the doctor refers to a PT.

The reason why getting proper medical input is important is because often back pain arises because of long standing, complex imbalances e.g. I had a weak core, which caused my legs to lock in a way that sort of compensated, which caused me to have an odd gait and to fall lots. Generally improving your strength was a good step, but if you’re experiencing pain like this, you may need help in identifying any underlying weaknesses.

Especially because injuries don’t just come from heavy or intensive exercise. I knew someone who had upper back pain that likely stemmed from poor posture. They identified the muscles that were painful and started doing stretches to that area. Even though it was only light intensity stretching they were doing, they were inadvertently exacerbating the root problem, which they didn’t learn until they had to be seen by a doctor urgently.

I don’t think duplicate link protection is what I mean, unless I’m misunderstanding how that feature works. I.e. if I had bookmarks “example.com/a” , “example.com/b”, these are duplicates even though they’re at the same site. But if I visit the page “example.com/c” and I went to go bookmark it, I would like to be able to see a thing that says '"from this site, you have also bookmarked: “example.com/a” , “example.com/b”.

I don’t imagine this is possible. I was probably going to make something to give me that functionality at some point, because I haven’t seen anyone having the same problem as me.

I have a question which may turn out to be a feature request

The question: How easy would it be to use Linkwarden to check whether I have already bookmarked something from the site I’m currently on? To clarify why I’m asking this, I have been generally trying to be more mindful in what media I consume, which means the things I enjoy reading are fragmented pieces that I may stumble upon through word of mouth.

For example, I read post ‘a’ on blog ‘A’ and I enjoy it so much that I bookmark it (‘Aa’) so I can find it for later sharing. Many months later, I am linked to post ‘b’ on site ‘A’, but I don’t remember whether I have been to this site before, and knowing that I had previously enjoyed post Aa may prompt me to actually read post Ab (or properly set aside for later)

Native Firefox bookmarks don’t do this, I know that much. It’s something I’ve been meaning to figure out how to solve, because one of the delightful, if somewhat overwhelming parts about floating on the ‘small web’, is the trust that builds up gradually after seeing sometime put out consistently good coverage

Yeah, maintenance is undervalued.

> Things are going well

“What are we paying you for?”

> Things are breaking

"What are we paying you for?

I love and hate in equal measure the hubris with which one regards a “simple” problem that turns out to be very difficult. I love it because it usually ends up being productive eventually. I hate it because it’s hard to emerge from the rabbit hole once you’ve committed to it.

“Ask a person and they’ll remember the exact reason why, both in the context of the requested change and the coding project limitations.”

Or if it’s something that they don’t directly know, they’ll know who will know. There’s a knowledge accountability chain that evolves out of pragmatic necessity and AI simply can’t replace that

It’s not fine if the code needs to be used by other scientists though, which it often will be, even within the same research group. I have a friend who worked in a lab where one of their PhD students wrote a bunch of helpful code that was an unmaintainable mess that ended up breaking a lot of work flows at some point a year or so after the creator of it had left. It was kludge upon kludge upon kludge, and the thing that finally broke seemed to be dependency related, but I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on with it (I was asked to take a look).

There’s a lot of duplicated effort in science. Scientists tend not to think about stuff like software ecosystems unless they’re in a subfield that has been doing computational stuff for a long while, like bioinformatics. When it comes to code, there’s a lot of inventing the wheel from scratch and that leads to weird square wheels that work good enough to then have more code built on top of them. Software might not be scientists’ product in the same way as it is for IT people, but it often ends up being a part of the wider product of methodological reproducibility

(disclaimer: I haven’t read the article, I’m just replying to you because your comment was interesting)

I think your theoretical vs practical framing is useful, but as a (non-computer-)scientist, I find it fascinating to consider how a biomedical scientist uses programming compared to someone whose background is much more grounded on the compsci/IT/programming side.^[1]

[1]: I sometimes joke that, compared to many of my scientist colleagues, I am an exceptional programmer, and this says a lot about the average quality of the code that scientists tend to write when they don’t have much dedicated training or experience in programming

Oh yeah, that’s one of the things that I’m tempted by. I just recognise that it’ll be a bit of a time sink (not necessarily a bad thing), and I should probably try it on a spare device or drive first. I’ve just been too busy to be able to sink my teeth into something like that, but hopefully some day.

A good guide or wiki makes a huge difference — I opted for Arch as my first Linux run, for example, because I kept seeing the Arch wiki be a useful resource when learning about general Linux things. Similarly, I have had a nosy at the Gentoo handbook and that too looks like a thorough and accessible resource (though it’s more Gentoo specific obviously).

As someone relatively new to Linux (been using as my daily driver for a couple of years now, but I still feel like a novice), I’ve been considering tinkering with Gentoo, and it low-key feels like considering starting using hard drugs.

Good word, I like it

Regardless of what your next steps are, I’m sorry for your loss.

“This isn’t about being spec-compliant anymore. I need to know the thought process behind this decision. And also please fix it.”

This unhinged tone is what I live for in blog posts

Edit: added hyperbole to make humourous intent clearer

Thanks for posting, OP. I have replied to a few people’s comments in this thread, and I’m really appreciating you sharing this post which has led to such thought-provoking discussion.

Oh man, you’re so right in highlighting how this problem manifests even in art. In a way, hobby related stuff is even harder because there’s a weird pressure arising from a sense that you’re not allowed to enjoy things that you’re not good at. And like, how are you meant to get better at a thing if it doesn’t feel permissible to be mediocre at it for a while? What if you don’t want to get better at a thing, what if someone is happy to just have fun with a hobby and doesn’t care if they are consistently mediocre at it, because they’re doing it for themselves.

And it doesn’t get better if you are good at the thing. Suddenly you’ve got people saying “wow, you’re so good at that, you should sell them”, and that’s then even more pressure because it reinforces the constant feeling that not only must one strive for the “correct answer” in all things, but that progress towards this answer involves selling the products of one’s labour because that’s how we try to translate intangibles into measurable numbers. But the logic falls apart because excellent leather craftsmanship, for example, isn’t at all related to one’s ability to be running a business, and every time I have monetised a hobby, it kills the joy of the craft. Similarly, I have a friend who is an artist who used to be earning money from art, but they got sick of doing pet portraiture and got an office job so they could regain art as a hobby. Things that sell well != Things that are good (and that’s even before we consider the Intrinsic value in dabbling in hobbies and creativity for fun’s sake)

I’ve seen a few people recommend that book, I should check it out.

A way of thinking about tech that I’ve found interesting is what philosopher Bernard Stiegler refers to as “φάρμακον”, or “pharmakon” (the greek root from where we get “pharmacy”). He uses the greek not just to be a pretentious arse, but because whilst it most directly translates to “medicine”, pharmakon also can mean a poison or toxin. Stiegler argues that technology can be both helpful and harmful, often at once. It depends on how we use it. ^[1]

(I’m reminded here also of Cory Doctorow’s discussion of reverse centaurs, because turning people into reverse centaurs is definitely the vibe of “pharmakon as poison”. At the core of it, most people aren’t being empowered by tech in our lives, and I really feel like we need a collective, radical recalibration around this. Books like “Digital Minimalism” certainly seem to be pushing towards that.

[1]: n.b. I am not a philosopher, nor have I actually directly read Stiegler, just a few people who draw on his work. One such person is Greta Goetz, an academic whose blog is great for people who like dense and wordy philosophy about tech and teaching.

What’s bogus about this?